The Story of the 
YelloAvstone 




By John H. Raftery 



1912 

All Rights Reserved 




PRESS OF 
McKeE PRfNTING COMPAT 
BUTTE, MONTANA 






13 



- 2^^"^^-'^ 



THE STORY OF THE 
YELLOWSTONE 



By JOHN H. RAFTERY 



Seeing America First. 

r W ^ HE past few years have 
«f|.| witnessed a propaganda 

SM having for its motto and 
' jB' motive the hne which 

jT^. heads this introductory 

\ chapter to this briefly 

^ :-^ descriptive "Story of the 

Yellowstone/' and the effects of the 
suggestion so given have been ap- 
parent for two years in those regions 
of scenic America to which the tour- 
ist seeking health, pleasure or excite- 
ment may go, without hazard, either 
to safety or comfort. It may be 
either erroneous or unfair to attribute 
the annual exodus of American tour- 
ists to Europe, to lack of loyalty or 

3 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

to ignorance of the unexplored 
wonders and beauties of their own 
land; for it is a fact that, until with- 
in comparatively recent years the 
cost and difficulty, the time and in- 
convenience involved in any consid- 
erable tour of the scenic wonders of 
the United States, made the annual 
trip to Switzerland, Paris, Venice or 
the Riviera, expeditious and econom- 
ical by contrast. 

To be sure the tuft-hunters and 
the social bounders of America may 
ahvays be expected to prefer the 
swarming resorts of the older con- 
tinent, and during every season 
abroad they will be found parading 
the peacock lanes and lobbies of the 
fashionable watering places of 
Europe. But in the yearly growing 
throngs of earnest, wholesome, self- 
reliant and studious Americans who 
visit the incomparable natural mar- 

4 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

vel? of American scenery, the exotic 
exquisities who have become habi- 
tues of Monte Carlo and the resorts 
of Europe where they are welcomed 
because they are rich and fleeced for 
the same reason, will not be missed. 
Nor is it any longer true that a 
tour or a vacation in any of the 
once remote wonderlands of North 
America need be either more in- 
convenient or more expensive than a 
similar trip abroad. Within the five 
years past nearly all of the most 
extensive and striking scenic re- 
gions of the Rocky Mountains have 
been made accessible and habitable 
to the tourist of moderate means. I 
have met experienced and blase trav- 
elers, tourists who had girdled the 
globe in search of new sensations in 
splendid natural spectacles, speech- 
less in amazement and chagrined 
with surprise over the unspeakable 

5 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

glories of the Yellowstone National 
Park, which they had overlooked or 
neglected for half a lifetime because 
it is ''so near home." 

The Pullman palace car, the 
modern hotel, the ubiquitous auto- 
mobile, the ramifying railroads, the 
inevitable telephone or telegraph and 
every device and luxury to minister 
to the needs and whims of the most 
exacting traveler and the most fragile 
tenderfoot have been supplied and 
emplaced for those who might not 
face the physical inconveniences of 
western American travel, even 
though they should live and die with- 
out confronting or encountering the 
portentious natural phenomena and 
the indescribable landscape beauties 
which nature has outspread in the 
Rocky Mountain region of the Unit- 
ed States as nowhere else in the ex- 
plored Avorld. 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Our National Playgrounds. 

At this writing the United States 
holds ownership of thirteen national 
parks, four and one half million 
acres, devoted to the preservation of 
the historic battlefields and the most 
estimable of the scenic splendors of 
this continent. There is now (1912) 
a bill before the Congress for the 
creation of a federal civil department 
to be known as the Bureau of Na- 
tional Parks, and it is the hope of the 
best informed frequenters and friends 
of our great natural pleasure grounds 
that such a department will be quick- 
ly erected into a service as distinct, 
as unified and as potential as that of 
the national Forest Service. It is my 
thought that the best ultimate ser- 
vice in the preservation and mainte- 
nance of the noblest national park 
or natural wonderland in the world, 
the Yellowstone, will be best achieved 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

when organized civilian authorities, 
adequately empowered and financed 
by the federal government as in a 
National Park Service, shall sup- 
plant the army both in the manage- 
ment and in the policing of the unique 
reservation. 

The changes, removals, limitations 
and details inevitable in the profes- 
sional activities of the regular mili- 
tary establishment do not in my opin- 
ion, make for the fullest, most per- 
manent or most effective manage- 
ment of the Yellowstone National 
Park. It is true that, in its early 
days, this priceless combination of 
paradise and inferno was endangered 
and disadvantaged by the maladmin- 
istration and connivance of incom- 
petent or corrupt civilians. But it 
is also true that by reason of the 
impermanency of their appointments, 
the briefness of their stay and the 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

unfamiliarity of the enlisted soldiery 
with the topography or geography 
of the region, the military superin- 
tendents of the Yellowstone National 
Park always will be at a disadvan- 
tage in the effective administration 
of the affairs of so unusual and so 
unmilitary a charge. 

There was, at the time of my first 
visit in the Yellowstone, the rem- 
nant of a troop of civilian scouts, 
some of whom had made their homes 
there for years, who knew every cav- 
ern and acclivity, every elk trail, bear 
den, buffalo w^allow^ and uncharted 
landmark in the yet primeval do- 
main ; they knew the habits and hab- 
itat of the wild creatures and they 
were wise, also, to the predatory or 
mischievous proclivities of the tame 
ones. On horseback in the open 
months and oil snowshoes in winter, 
year after year they had penetrated 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

and traversed the remotest as well 
as the most frequented portions of 
the wild region. Driving out poach- 
ers, coasting the glaciers, camping 
in the outlying "snowshoe cabins" 
when the thermometer was 30 or 
more degrees below zero, these 
weather-beaten scouts became ideal 
guides and guardians of the park be- 
cause over and above their meagre 
pay they knew it as their home and 
that the world does not contain a 
more precious or a more kingly es- 
tate. 

To the enlisted soldier, on the 
other hand, assignment to Fort Yel- 
lowstone means only change of post ; 
lie soon learns the grand tour and 
how to cut a dash on the parkways 
and finished drives ; he is a fine figure 
in a fine settins:, but he neither 
kiiows nor cares where the changing 
chances of his soldiery may take him 

10 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

any dav. He is unfamiliar witli the 
phenomena, the beauties, the locale 
or nomenclature of the wonderful re- 
gion and even as a protector of the 
curiosities, the now historic forma- 
tions and the rules and regulations 
of the park, his unmistakable uni- 
form and his routine methods of ap- 
pearance and disappearance, mini- 
mize what individual efficiency he 
may have acquired as a patrol, scout 
or policeman. . . 

Much of the data and description 
contained in this little book were ob- 
tained and written under the direc- 
tion of Lieut. Gen. S. B. M. Young, 
and were presented to President 
Roosevelt in the United States sen- 
ate by the late Senator Thos H. 
C?rter of Montana with a letter from 
General Young on the occasion of his 
retirement from the superintendency 
of the Yellowstone National park. 
11 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

That portion, which appeared as a 
senate document of the Sixtieth con- 
gress, is contained in the following 
pages as well as a short account of 
a week w^hich I spent at the Grand 
canyon during the blizzard of Febru- 
ary last year (1911). To Maj. Chit- 
tenden's book ''The Yellowstone," 
to the late David E. Folsom, to 
ex-Governor Samuel D. Hauser and 
Mr. C. W. Cook, who were members 
of the first discovery exploration 
party and who aided me with a few 
personal sidelights on that part of 
this brief but authentic ''story," I 
wish to include credit if there be such 
in projecting this small work. 

Not for the average tourist will 
the winter glories of the Yellow- 
stone be unfolded, for during a ma- 
jor portion of the year the whole 
region is the theater of overwhelm- 
ing storms and extremes of rigorous 

12 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

temperature unequaled or unknown 
in any other part of the Rocky moun- 
tains. The depth and continuity of 
the snowfalls, the enforced closing 
of the splendid summer hotels, the 
impassability of the main tours as 
well as the unfrequented byways ex- 
cept on snow shoes, make a winter 
visit to the Yellowstone an adventure 
forbidden except to the hardiest and 
most courageous sightseer. And for 
the hibernating peace, the yet wild 
domesticity, the sanctuary from pur- 
suing hunters and the instinctive 
sense of security which winter hi the 
Yellowstone assures to the milhons 
of wild creatures which inhabit it, it 
is perhaps best that winter drops his 
gates of ice and rears his ramparts 
of snow across and around its mys- 
terious recesses for more than half 
the time. And in order that my 
reader, you who will visit this most 
13 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

incredibly wonderful region, in the 
pleasant, verdant days of summer, 
may have the contrast even at sec- 
ond hand, in order that you may ap- 
prehend some of the climatic as well 
3s permanent prodigies which Na- 
ture achieves in The Yellowstone, I 
have included a chapter about ''The 
Park In Winter.'' 

Fable Becomes History. 

For a complete understanding and 
appreciation of the Yellowstone Na- 
tional park, wdiether as a pleasure 
ground, a health resort or a place for 
scientific investigation, personal and 
repeated visits to it are necessary. 
The accounts of its discovery, ex- 
ploration, and establishment as a na- 
tional park have been written with 
varying degrees of accuracy, and 
writers of vivid fancy and contrasted 

14 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

literary qualifications have vied with 
one another in enthusiastic word pic- 
tures of the phenomena, beautiful, 
sinister, or scientific, of the premier 
wonderland of all the world. 

From every corner of the civilized 
world students and savants, poets, 
painters, and practicians have come 
to witness, study, and describe the 
alternating manifestations of nature 
in spectacles magnificent or mon- 
strous; and while each has contrib- 
uted somewhat to the public's knowl- 
edge of this incomparable region the 
aggregate mass of their descriptive 
work falls far short of a complete 
and convincing exploitation of its 
wonders. Indeed, the scope of spoken 
or written language, the range of the 
human imagination, and the power 
of pigments spread upon the artist's 
canvas become feeble, narrow and al- 
most impotent in the presence of the 

15 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

majestic and outlandish marvels of 
Yellowstone park. 

Out of the vague, unwritten lore 
of Indian tradition come the remote 
rumors of an enchanted land among 
the mountains w^iere the rivers 
boiled, the earth burned and haunted 
lakes tossed spectral plumes of scald- 
ing steam into the zenith. Here in 
cauldrons of gypsum or jasper or 
jade the evil spirits mixed their war 
paint, and from peak and promon- 
tory, in the valleys, and on the hills 
could be seen the spiral smoke of 
their bale fires. The nomads of the 
Northwest shunned it as a land of 
evil haunt* or prowled about its mar- 
gins in awesome fear and reverence. 

Sioux, Blackfoot, Crow, and Ban- 
nock ventured to the verge of these 
demon-haunted fastnesses, and in 
timorous truces made stores of ar- 
rowheads from the mountain of 

16 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

black obsidian which looms above the 
river near its golden gate. Beyond 
that portal was a realm of mysterious 
and infernal portent. Looking back 
a full century we find that the story 
of the Yellowstone park is a secjuen- 
tial link in the chain of epochal 
events which commenced with the 
purchase by the United States of the 
then unchartered wilderness called 
the "Louisiana Territory," the sub- 
sequent expedition of Lewis and 
Clark, the discovery of gold, the con- 
quest of the savages, and all the epic 
deeds which achieved at last the win- 
ning of the West. 

Over a century ago (1810) there 
returned from the wilds of the north-, 
w^est one John Colter, a scout, trap- 
per and hunter, who had been with 
Lewis and Clark in their historic ex- 
pedition. It was upon the return trip 
of the party that Colter, at his own 

17 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

request, was discharged near the 
confluence of the Yellowstone river 
with the Missouri. He had won the 
confidence and respect of his com- 
manderSj who supplied him food and 
ammunition for his new venture. 
With two companions Colter then set 
out for the headwaters of the Mis- 
souri, trapping, hunting and trading 
in friendly commerce with the In- 
dians. 

Colter seems to have been a man 
of almost infinite endurance, courage 
and perseverance. The record of his 
doings from August, 1806, when he 
parted with Lewis and Clark, until 
the spring of 1807 is not extant, but 
early in the latter 3^ear he arrived at 
the mouth of the Platte in a canoe. 
There he met Manuel Lisa, the fam- 
ous fur trader, who was organizing 
a trapping and hunting expedition 
into the very regions from which 

18 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Colter had come. So timely a prize 
as the services of Colter was not to 
be overlooked, and he was induced to 
retm-n into the wilderness with the 
Lisa party. Maj. Hiram M. Chitten- 
den's book, 'The Yellowstone," in 
many respects the best that has been 
written about the national park, de- 
votes considerable space to the ac- 
tivities of Colter, who was unques- 
tionably the first white discover of 
the region. For it was in 1807 that 
he passed through the Yellowstone 
wonderland, viewing for the first 
time the boiling springs about the 
lake, the tar springs at the fork of 
the Shoshone, and skirting the Yel- 
lowstone river from its source past 
the upper and lower falls to the ford 
above Tower falls and thence to 
Lisa's fort." 

Wounded in battle between the 
Crows and Blackfeet, alone, ill-pro- 

19 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

vided with ammunition or food, the 
intrepid Colter traversed on this jour- 
ney afoot hundreds of miles of the 
wildest and most rugged country on 
earth. He had hardly recovered 
from the effects of his hardships 
when Lisa sent him back to the hos- 
tile Blackfeet for the purpose of 
opening up trading negotiations with 
them. Nothing daunted by the fact 
that he .had appeared with the Crows 
in battle against them, knowing that 
Lewis had slain one of their number, 
Colter, in company w^th a single 
comrade named Potts, adventured 
back into the hunting ground of the 
Indians on the upper Missouri. Pad- 
dling up that river one morning the 
two trappers were suddenly sur- 
rounded by a swarm of more than 
500 Blackfeet warriors, who lined 
either shore and bade the white men 
land. 

20 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Colter's First Visit. 

As they did so an Indian seized 
Pott's rille, but Colter, who was a 
mighty man, wrenched the weapon 
from the red man and handed it to 
Potts. The latter in panic leaped into 
the canoe and pushed it out into the 
stream. An arrow struck him, and 
crying out: "Colter, Pm wounded," 
Potts seized his rifle and shot his as- 
sailant dead. A showxr of arrows 
from the enraged savages ended the 
life of Potts right there. Whether 
he used his rifle to invite a sudden 
death in preference to the prolonged 
torture which he anticipated at the 
hands of his captors will never be 
known, but his comrade was cjuickly 
disarmed and stripped naked as for 
the torture. After the Indians had 
conferred they asked Colter if he was 
a good runner. 

21 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The chance of running the gaunt- 
let or being chased by 500 fleet- 
footed savages bent upon his murder 
gave him a pale gleam of hope, and 
although he was reputed one of the 
speediest and most enduring run- 
ners of the West, he told the chief 
that he was both weary and slow. 
They led him three or four hundred 
yards out upon the prairie and bade 
him run for his life. Barefoot, nude, 
with half a thousand screaming de- 
mons at his back, but with the in- 
domitable courage of a man who 
loves life, he ran as no white man ever 
ran before. His feet and legs were 
pierced with hundreds of the thorns 
of the prickly pear, blood spurted 
from his nose and mouth, and his 
breath came only in stertorous gasps 
before he ventured to look back. 

He had gained on all of his pur- 
suers except one, an agile young 

22 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

warrior, who, with brandished spear, 
was swiftly closing down upon him. 
With sudden desperation Colter 
stood stock still. The Indian, in try- 
ing to do likewise, stumbled and fell. 
The badly-launched spear stuck in 
the ground and was broken off. The 
hunted white man seized the barbed 
half, impaled his fallen foe to the 
earth and set off with renewed vigor 
for the Jefferson fork of the Mis- 
souri, which he saw gleaming 
through the trees. He had run more 
than six miles. He was covered with 
blood, his feet were torturing him, 
but he gained the fringe of willows 
by the river, and saw his enemies yel- 
ling and screaming about their dead 
brother. A raft of driftwood, snags 
and branches accumulated at the 
head of a sandbar downstream 
caught Colter's eye. He dived into 
the river, and swimming under 

23 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

water, came up within the shelter of 
the drift. 

Search as they would, the Indians 
could not find him, and concluded he 
was drow^ned. He kept his hiding 
place till night had fallen, and then, 
chilled by the icy water, footsore, 
hungry, weakened from loss of blood, 
and stark naked, he struck bravely 
into the forest for a seven days' 
struggle back to Lisa's camp. He 
reached it after a week of the most 
exquisite agony, toil and exposure. 
Such was the man and such the trials 
which give John Colter an enviable 
and enduring place amongst the real- 
ly great explorers of this country. 
John Bradbury, in his "Travels in 
North America," is authority for 
most of the details here mentioned, 
and so ably and accurately written 
was the book of the English natural- 
ist that A\^ashington Irving in his 

24 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

''Astoria'' uses the Bradbury text 
with but few alterations. 

Coming back to St. Louis in 1810, 
John Colter's tales of almost incredi- 
ble ventures, discoveries, and hard- 
ships were scouted by most of his 
hearers, but he won the respectful 
attention of Gen. William Clark, who 
knew him, and of Henry M. Breck- 
enridge, the author, and John Brad- 
bury, whose writings have been sub- 
sequently authenticated by the ex- 
plorations and researches of scores 
of dependable authorities. Colter's 
iourney through what is now the 
Yellowstone wonderland took him in 
a generally northwest direction from 
the southeasterly corner of the park, 
and^ although he saw the hot springs 
about the Yellowstone lake and river, 
and must have passed close to both 
the upper and lower falls, he makes 
no mention of the latter, nor did he 

25 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

catch a glimpse of the great geysers 
of the upper and lower basin, nor the 
mammoth hot springs, nor any of the 
other marvels except the tar springs. 

Oldest Records of White Men. 

In 1880 Col. P. W. Norris, then 
superintendent of the park, discov- 
ered what is believed to be, after 
Colter's, the oldest record of the 
presence of the white man in that 
region. In a ravine about half a 
mile above the upper falls Colonel 
Norris found an ancient tree upon 
the bark of which, partly over grown 
but yet decipherable,, was the in- 
scription "J. O. R. Aug. 19, 1819." 
Careful investigation of the names 
and exploits of all the early trappers, 
hunters and scouts has failed to even 
remotely indicate the identity of J. O. 
R. Although the date of the inscrip- 

26 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

tion was verified by counting the an- 
nual rings upon an adjacent tree, and 
though nearly obliterated, it remains 
a ])roof that white men visited the 
park after Colter and full fi/ty years 
before its final discovery. In 187S, 
in caches by Beaver lake and the Ob- 
sidian cliff, Colonel Norris found 
marten traps of a pattern used by the 
Hudson Bay company a half century 
previous; and at the foot of Mount 
Washburn, near the rim of the 
Grand Canyon, Frederick Bottler 
found the ruins of a block house of 
incalculable antiquity. The Wash- 
burn-Langford expedition of 1870 
found near Mud Geyser, on the east 
bank of the Yellowstone river, an old 
dismantled pit or trench w^hich might 
have been used as a place of con- 
cealment for hunters of waterfowl. 

In 1871 Mrs. Frances Fuller Vic- 
tor published a book, "The River of 

27 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

the West," which is a sort of biogra- 
phy of a pioneer trapper named 
Joseph Meek. In 1829, when the 
Rocky Mountain Fur company with- 
drew from the field then dominated 
by the Hudson Bay company, Meek, 
who had been in the employ of the 
former under Capt. William Sublette, 
^vas lost from his comrades and 
wandered for several days until he 
was found starving and half crazed 
by two of his party. There is no 
doubt that he was at one time in the 
hot springs district of the park, for 
he describes in his diary a ''whole 
country smoking with vapor from 
boiling springs, and burning with 
gases issuing from small craters 
each of which was emitting a sharp, 
whistling sound, -i^ >i^ * Inter- 
spersed among these on the level 
plam w^ere larger craters, some of 
them from four to six miles across. 

28 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Out of these craters issued blue 
flames and molten brimstone/' 

Allowing for possible exaggera- 
tion, Meek's assertion that fire and 
brimstone issued from these craters 
is not wholly unsubstantiated. Writ- 
ing in 1811, Henry M. Breckenridge 
says : ''Mr. Lisa informs me that 
about 60 miles from his fort (at the 
mouth of the Bighorn) there is a 
volcano that actually emits flames." 
Major Chittenden and others of like 
sincerity and diligence have con- 
cluded from this and other early 
writings and traditions that there 
was volcanic activit}^ in the Rocky 
mountains as late as the beginning 
of the nineteenth century. To War- 
ren Angus Ferris, a clerk for the 
American Fur company from 1830 
to 1840, Chittenden gives the honor 
of having written the first actual de- 
scription of the Firehole Geyser 

29 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Basin. Returning from his station 
in the Flathead country in the 
spring of 1834, Ferris, yet incredu- 
lous of the marvelous tales he had 
heard of the boiling fountains of the 
Yellowstone region, took two Pend 
d'Oreille Indians with him and fol- 
lowed up the Firehole river. On 
May 20, 1834, he woke in full view 
of the outlandish phenomena of the 
Upper Geyser Basin, convinced at 
last and exclaiming, 'The half has 
not been told me." 

Ferris's journal of this adventure 
was published in 1842 and proves 
conclusively that the great geysers 
had been seen and appreciated long- 
before 1870, when the Washburn- 
Langford expedition made the first 
and ultimately adequate exploration 
of the park, an achievement which 
culminated in the erection and pres- 
ervation of the most magnificent, the 

30 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

largest, and the most eventful na- 
tional pleasure park the world has 
yet known. Father De Smet, the 
famous Jesuit missionary, writing in 
1852, was the first to give an accu- 
rate geographical definition of the 
geyser district, locating them with 
precision both as to latitude and lon- 
gitude. Gunnison, in his "History of 
the Mormons," published in 1852, 
like Father De Smet, drew much of 
his information about the Yellow- 
stone country from Capt. James 
Bridger, the famous frontiersman 
whose strange yarns of the mar- 
vels he had there beheld remained 
discredited or tabooed by such wri- 
ters as Hayden, Warren, Reynolds, 
and others as late as 1860. 

The first governmental expedition 
sent expressly to explore and chart 
what is now the Yellowstone Na- 
tional park set out in the early spring 

31 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

of 1859 under command of Capt. W. 
F. Raynolds, of the corps of topo- 
.^raphical engineers of the United 
States army. He did not reach the 
locality of the park until the summer 
of 1860, nor did he ever penetrate 
the valley of the upper Yellowstone, 
so that except for a map in which, as 
he himself admits, the most interest- 
ing portion of the regions remains a 
''terra incognita," Captain Raynold's 
expedition yielded little of accurate 
information about the central glories 
of the Yellowstone park. Immedi- 
ately upon his return the national 
election brought the country face to 
face with armed rebellion; disruption 
threatened the Union, peaceful pur- 
suits were abandoned, the military 
establishment was mustering for war 
and the western wonderland was left 
to slumber in the memories of the few^ 
who had seen it or heard about it. 

32 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Scientific Exploration. 

From 1863 to 1869 the northwest- 
ern hegira was made up of gold seek- 
ers, hardy adventurers and pros- 
pectors, drawn thither by the discov- 
ery of the great placer mines of Mon- 
tana. Sometimes in pairs, but often- 
er in groups, they wandered into the 
confines of what is now the national 
park; but with their hearts set only 
upon mining and their minds feverish 
with the thirst for gold, they gave 
but a cursory glance at the stupend- 
ous wonders which then first came 
within their ken. 

In August and September of 1863 
we find Walter W. De Lacy leading 
a band of prospectors into some 
theretofore unknown sections of the 
region. They traversed the hot 
springs locality east of Yellowstone 
lake, camped at the junction of the 
Snake and Lewis rivers, explored the 

33 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Pitchstone Plateau, descended Moose 
creek valley, discovered the true 
drainage of Shoshone lake, passed 
through the Lower Geyser Basin, 
casually witnessed the play of the 
Great Fountain Geyser, and went out 
via the junction of the Gibbon and 
Firehole rivers. 

Finding but scant indications of 
gold, these, like other prospectors 
who passed through the park be- 
tween 1863 and 1869, gave slight 
heed to the scenic splendors through 
which they passed; and yet their un- 
avoidable reference to the geysers, 
springs, canyons and rivers served in 
a cumulative way to whet the inter- 
est and focus the attention of men in 
whom science, sentiment and the pas- 
sion for adventure were already mak- 
ing for the ultimate exploitation of 
the world's wonderland. De Lacy in 
1863, James Stuart in 1864, George 

34 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Huston in 1866, and two prospecting 
parties in 1867 contributed much to 
the waxing fame of the paradise that 
had until then been regarded as re- 
mote, if not as imaginary as the 
mountains of the moon and the val- 
leys of the shadows. 

As early as in 1867 prominent and 
practical men of Montana had been 
earnestly considering an extensive, 
thorough and scientific exploration 
of the region from which so many 
strange tales had come. Party after 
party was organized for the venture, 
but the uprising of the hostile Black- 
feet and the sporadic forays of other 
savage tribes discouraged and dis- 
mayed them all until 1869'. 

In that year David E. Folsom, a 
qualified surveyor of Montana, and 
C. W. Cook, both men of excellent 
education and alert intelligence, de- 
termined to wait no longer upon the 

35 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

doubts and fears of their neighbors 
of Montana, and on September 9, 
with provisions for six weeks, and 
only one man, WilHam Peterson, ac- 
companying them, they set forth 
from Diamond City, 40 miles from 
Helena, Mont., for an expedition that 
first won and commanded popular in- 
terest in the new Eldorado of mysti- 
cal beauty. 

Reaching the Yellowstone River 
near the confines of the park they 
followed its eastern shore line and 
reached the falls on September 21. 
They crossed the river above the now 
famous cataracts, examined Sulphur 
Mountain and the adjacent hot 
springs, followed the western margin 
of the river past Mud Geyser and 
the Emerald Grotto, re-crossed the 
river at the outlet of the lake and 
skirted the eastern and southern 
shores of the extreme western arm. 

36 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Thence they headed for Shoshone 
Lake, viewing in tnrn the beauties 
of the Firehole River and the awe- 
some spectacle of the Fountain and 
Excelsior geysers in full eruption. 

For the first time also they saw 
and recited the weird and wraithlike 
manifestations of Prismatic Lake and 
the scarcely less wonderful cones, 
craters, pools and springs which are 
scattered about that formation in be- 
wildering variety and profusion. 
A\ved by the majestic sights which 
they had witnessed and dazed by the 
portentous demonstrations of the 
subterranean inferno over which 
they had passed in trembling safety, 
they went out of the country through 
the valley of the Madison River, 
bringing to the outside world the 
first secjuential and convincing ac- 
count of the facts which up to that 

37 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

time had been considered as prepos- 
terous and visionary. 

The Incredulous Public. 

Returning- to Helena, where their 
reputation for veracity was as high 
as their known courage amongst the 
leading men of the Territory, both 
Foisom and Cook refused to risk 
their reputations by telling their ex- 
periences to a promiscuous crowd. 
Gen. Henry D. Washburn, the sur- 
veyor-general of Montana; Gov. 
Samuel T. Hauser; Truman C. 
Everts, ex-United States assessor for 
Montana; Nathaniel P. Langford, 
who afterwards became first super- 
intendent of the national park, all 
gave wondering heed and credence 
to the statements of the home-com- 
ers. New plans for a larger and 
more exhaustive exploration of the 

38 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

wonderful region were now made. 
General Sheridan, who visited Hel- 
ena at that time, became vastly in- 
terested and gave ass-urances of mili- 
tary aid to the proposed expedition. 
Mr. Folsom, who was rarely gifted 
as a writer as well as an observant 
explorer, then wrote a concise, logi- 
cal, and sequential account of the 
marvels which he and Mr. Cook had 
witnessed in the Yellowstone coun- 
try, and sent it to Harper's Alaga- 
zine. The editor of that publication, 
astounded by the audacious "imag- 
inings" of the author and wholly in- 
credulous as to the statements made 
in it, declined the article and returned 
it to its chagrined author. It finally 
gained publication in the Western 
Monthly, of Chicago, but not until 
the copy reader had eliminated many 
of the most interesting passages be- 
cause they were considered ''ultra- 

39 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

montane" in both a literal and a fig- 
urative sense. 

With the exception of the publish- 
ers' proof, which passed into the 
hands of Mr. Langford, the whole 
issue of the magazine containing Mr. 
Folsom's story of the park was de- 
stroyed by fire. In later years Mr. 
Langford, at his own expense, print- 
ed and distributed 500 copies of the 
narrative and donated the original to 
the Montana Historical Society, 
which yet retains it among the treas- 
ured archives of the State. 

The plans of the Washburn-Lang- 
ford party took tangible form in the 
spring of 1870, when Mr. Langford 
visited Major-General Hancock at 
St Paul, outlined the proposed ex- 
pedition, and secured from him a 
promise of a military escort. ' Sam- 
uel T. Hauser also visited General 
Hancock about that time, so that on 

40 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

August 17, 1870, when the party, 
equipped for a journey of four weeks, 
set out from Bozeman, Mont., it was 
known that orders had already been 
forwarded to Fort Elhs providing 
a niihtary escort of one heutenant, 
one sergeant, and four enhsted men. 

Fourteen civihans, with a train of 
pack and saddle horses, adequately 
armed and equipped with the essen- 
tial scientific instruments and com- 
manded by General Washburn, were 
reinforced at Fort Ellis by Lieut. 
Gustavus C. Doane, a sergeant and 
four troopers of the Second United 
States Cavalry, and constituted the 
none too formidable cavalcade which 
then rode into a wild region infested 
with hostile Indians for the first and 
most consequential exploration of the 
Yellowstone wonderland. 

llie party, though shadowed by 
roving bands of prowling savages, 

41 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

arrived without mishap at the month 
of the Gardiner River on August 
26, entering the present domain of the 
park not far from the northern gate- 
way, the present site of the stately 
and magnificent lava arch. Holding 
to the trail, which led along the left 
bank of the Yellowstone, the party 
missed the Mammoth Hot Springs 
altogether, encountering first the 
fascinatingly beautiful wonders of 
the cascades and spires of Tower 
Falls, and coming upon the initial 
apparition of the Grand Canyon it- 
self on the eastern flank of what was 
a mountain, soon named Mount 
W'^ashburn. 

A Land Enchanted. 

The eager spirit of their leader 
prompted General Washburn then to 
adventure from the camp alone in 
search of signs that he was leading 

42 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

his party aright. He scaled the rug- 
ged sides of the precipitous moun- 
tain, and, from its bald and rusted 
summit far above timber and snow, 
his eye for the first time swept over 
that panorama which in its magnifi- 
cent extent, variety, and Titanic maj- 
esty has not been ec[ualed in the 
known world. Perched upon the pin- 
nacle rock, a central atom within an 
incredible amphitheater, he looked in 
all directions across the overmas- 
tering silence to where the ragged 
peaks of the Grand Tetons, the Ab- 
sarokas, and countless unnamed 
mountains rose up against the cloud- 
less blue like the encincturing and 
crenelated battlements of an un- 
known kingdom. 

He saw, too, far to the southeast, 
the far-spread, shining waters of Yel- 
lowstone Lake, the focal point of the 
expedition and, nearer yet, but only 

43 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

as a dark gash across the green tunic 
of the valley below, the winding out- 
line of the Grand Canyon. Across 
through the pale haze that hung 
above the valleys more remote he 
could descry the flaunting jets of 
steam uprising from the geysers, and 
all about, on grassy upland, by the 
lush brink of brook or pool, and upon 
the rock-strewn inaccessible promon- 
tories, he could see elk, deer, and 
mountain sheep like tiny specks of 
brown and white upon the green. 

The account of that day's adven- 
ture heartened his tired company to 
new and zealous effort. They pushed 
on next day, following the brink of 
the deepening canyon of the river to 
camp within sound of the mighty 
falls of the Yellowstone. 

Only the hundreds of thousands of 
tourists who have witnessed the as- 
tounding combination of majesty and 

44 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

beauty accomplished here by nature 
can reahze the rapt astonishment 
with which these men of the Wash- 
burn-Langford expedition first gazed 
upon the falls and canyon of the Yel- 
lowstone. Some of them, men who, 
for all their early nurture, had been 
hardened by years of adventure, war- 
fare, hardship, and disappointment, 
sat for hours upon the dizzy rim of 
the canyon gazing into its unearthly 
abysses, bound by the spell of its 
indescribable beauty, and choking the 
sobs forced from their startled hearts 
by the unspeakable and portentous 
wonders which their eyes saw but 
their minds could not encompass. 

Nor can the extraordinary emo- 
tions of these adventuring men be 
ascribed in any degree to their lack 
of previous descriptions ; Folsom's 
word picture of the wonders he had 
witnessed in 1869 remains even now 

45 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

one of the most graphic, convincing, 
and detailed accounts of his experi- 
ence, and the men of the Washburn 
expedition had read it or heard it 
from his own eloquent lips. 

Since then the world has been 
widely and well advised of what the 
traveler may expect when he shall 
gaze upon the strange sights of the 
Yellowstone National Park; the fan- 
cies of descriptive writers have been 
wrought into fine frenzies in attempts 
to realize its phenomena for readers 
of all tongues and tribes ; year after 
year the painters come to limn its 
baffling outlines and to catch and 
fasten down forever the radiant glor- 
ies of its coloring; travelers from 
every corner of the w^orld have come 
to contrast it with the wonder places 
of their wanderings. 

And all of them have come to 
know and admit that the language 

46 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

which can tell its story is unwritten 
and unspoken of man; that there is 
no palette wide enough to carry the 
colors, shades and tones wdiich nature 
brought to its creation; that compar- 
ison becomes futile and is forgotten 
in the presence of marvels without 
their counterparts on the globe. 

The Grand Canyon Disclosed. 

The party had now followed the 
rim of the canyon for almost thirty 
miles. Commencing its swift descent 
just above the upper falls, the de- 
scending chasm gains 200 feet in 
depth where the first waterfall 
plunges to the new^ level of the river ; 
thence for a half a mile, foaming 
over gigantic boulders and lashing 
the precipitous w^alls of the deepening 
gorge, it adds over 600 feet to its 
swift descent, seeming to pause for a 

47 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

breathless instant upon the out-thrust 
Hp of a level floor of rock, the river 
plunges its mighty current sheer into 
the silent depths 320 feet below. 

Out of the rainbow-streaked mist 
of the lower falls the Yellowstone 
River begins its tortuous journey be- 
tween the walls of that incredible 
canyon which towers more than half 
a vertical mile above the river, un- 
folding in sequence sudden, gradual, 
and indescribable, a panorama that 
stands alone in its mingled marvels 
of color and magnitude, of beauty 
and wildness, of tenderness and 
power. 

From the falls of the Yellowstone 
the Washburn expedition pushed on 
past Sulphur Mountain with its sur- 
rounding wonders of boiling pools 
and springs, the stifling fumes, the 
crusts of lava, and the volcanic de- 
posits all giving token of the furious 

48 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

upheavals of some ancient time when 
the splendors of the grand canyon 
and the sinister monstrosities of the 
geyser regions of the park sprang 
simultaneous from the tortured womb 
of the world. 

Here for the first time the explor- 
ers realized the almost unthinkable 
disparity of contrast in the phenom- 
ena which the Yellowstone wonder- 
land presents, and with the inspira- 
tion awakened by the incomparable 
beauty of the falls and canyon yet 
upon them, they came presently into 
the presence of the mud volcano, 
from whose hideous crater 30 feet 
in depth and almost as wide, uprose 
an unclean fountain of boiling, liv- 
ing, paste-like mud. The earth about 
It trembled and from its vile caverns 
uttered muffled groans like the stifled 
cadences of some infernal engine. 

\\' ithin the wide circle of its sick- 

49 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

ening influence the side of the moun- 
tain was all defiled, the trees coated 
with livid mud, and the air noxious 
with the pungent fumes of sulphur. 
And yet the fascinated and horrified 
visitor will find but a few rods away 
from this monstrous manifestation, 
an orifice in the same acclivity which 
is groined and arched like the en- 
trance to some miniature temple, its 
outer surface stained with a beauti- 
ful green, its rocky walls changing 
to olive, brown and yellow as they 
recede and converge within. And 
always from out of this little cavern 
com.es a pulsating gush of water, hot, 
but limpid as any mountain brook, 
projected out of the darkness within 
as by the stroke of an unseen steamer 
and accentuated by the measured, 
rythmic escapement from its hidden 
vent. Nearby there is a spring of 
tartaric acid, a half mile away one 

50 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

of alum, about which the crystals are 
piled in lavish beauty. 

The Lake Above the Clouds. 

Having crossed the river below the 
outlet, the Washburn party camped 
September 3 on the shore of Yellows- 
stone Lake, 7,788 feet above sea 
level, the largest body of water in 
North America at so great an alti- 
tude. Across the smooth surface of 
its shining waters, 150 square miles 
in area, they could see the towering 
Teton range standing upon the 
boundary line between Idaho and 
Wyoming, and lifting their snow- 
covered peaks 14,000 feet above the 
level of tide water. 

Around the forest girdled margin 
of this great mountain lake they 
pushed their way on the opposite 
shore from wdiere the Lake Hotel is 

51 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

now. On September 9 Mr. Everts 
was lost from his comrades and com- 
menced those thirty-seven days of 
peril which is part of the history of 
the park, and which so nearly 
brought an awful death to one of its 
earliest and most ardent champions. 
After days of hopeless toil and inces- 
sant search, the party gave him up 
and, running short of provisions, 
struck out across the mountains to- 
ward the valley of the Madison. 

The following succinct account of 
Everts's experience is from the pen 
of Lieutenant Doane, and is in the 
main correct; for Everts's own ac- 
count see Scribner's Monthly, Vol- 
ume III, page 1 : 

''On the first day of his absence 
he had left his horse standing unfas- 
teilcd, with all his arms and equip- 
ments strapped upon his saddle; the 
animal became frightened, ran away 

52 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

into the woods, and he was left with- 
out even a pocketknife as a means 
of defense. Being" very nearsighted, 
and totally unused to traveling in a 
wild country without guides, he be- 
came completely bewildered. He 
wandered down to the Snake River 
Lake (Heart Lake), where he re- 
mained twelve days, sleeping near 
the hot spring's to keep from freez- 
ing at night, and climbing to the 
summits each day in the endeavor to 
trace out his proper course. Here he 
subsisted on thistle roots boiled in 
the springs, and was kept up a tree 
the greater part of one night by a 
California lion. After gathering and 
cooking a supply of thistle roots, he 
managed to strike the southwest 
point of the (Yellowstone) Lake, and 
followed around the north side to 
the (Yellowstone) River, finally 
reaching our (old) camp opposite the 

' 53 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Grand Canyon. He \vas twelve days 
out before he thought to kindle a 
fire by using the lenses of his field 
glass, but afterwards carried a burn- 
ing brand with him in all his wander- 
ings. Herds of game passed by him 
during the night, on many occasions 
when he was on the verge of starva- 
tion. In addition to a tolerable sup- 
ply of thistle roots, he had nothing 
for over thirty days but a handful 
of minnows and a couple of snow- 
birds. Twice he went five days with- 
out food, and three days without 
water, in that country which is a net- 
work of streams and springs. He 
was found on the verge of the great 
plateau, above the mouth of Gardi- 
ner River. A heavy snowstorm had 
extinguished his fire; his supply of 
thistle roots w^as exhausted; he was 
partially deranged, and perishing 
with cold. A lion was killed near 

54' - 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

him, on the trail, which he said had 
followed him at a short distance for 
several days previously. It was a 
miraculous escape, considering the 
utter helplessness of the man, lost in 
a forest wilderness, and with the 
storms of winter at hand." 

On the thirty-seventh day of his 
wanderings (September 9 to October 
16) he was discovered by J^ck Bar- 
onett and George A. Pritchett near 
the great trail on a high mountain a 
few miles west of Yancey's. Baron- 
ett threw up a mound of stones to 
mark the spot. He carried Everts in 
his arms the rest of that day, and 
passed the nig-ht on a small tributary 
of Blacktail Deer Creek. The next 
day he was taken on a saddle to near 
the mouth of the Gardiner. 

Passing into the now famous Fire- 
hole Valley, the explorers emerged 
suddenly upon that strange plateau 

55 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

of which Charles T. Whitmell, ad- 
dressing the Cardiff (Wales) Nat- 
uralists' Society, said: 

''Nowhere else, I believe, can be 
seen on so grand a scale such clear 
evidence of dying volcanic action. We 
seem to witness the death throes of 
some great American Enceladus. 
Could Dante have seen this region 
he might have added another terror 
to his Inferno." 

A Wilderness of Geysers, 

Here, within that narrow radius 
of a mile w^iich is now known as the 
''Upper Geyser Basin," 26 geysers 
and more than 400 hot springs were 
discovered within a few hours' 
search. It was a bright September 
day when the Washburn party first 
emerged upon this treeless tract and 
saw, scarcely 200 yards away, that 

56 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

great jet of steam and water tossing 
its roaring head 150 feet into the air 
which has since become known 
throughout the civihzed world as 
"Old Faithful Geyser.'^ 

The sunlight transfigured its clear 
water to crystal showers and the 
breeze flaunting its spray and vapor 
to diaphanous banners colored with 
all the rainbow tints and floating 
away against the far background of 
green, combined with the quivering 
of the encrusted earth and the rum- 
bling tumult of subterranean forces 
to produce upon the speechless ad- 
venturers a sense of glorified and 
yet timorous astonishment. For cen- 
turies incalculable, every hour, with 
hardly the variation of five minutes, 
in snow and rain, by day and night, 
in winter and in summer, with none 
but the wild men of the primeval 
days or the wilder beasts of the wil- 

57 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

derness, or with the modern multi- 
tudes of tourists to witness its erup- 
tions, as though regulated by some 
superhunian horologe and energized 
by infinite power, Old Faithful has 
gone on with its strange work. 

Scattered about upon the surface 
of this miraculous formation are 
geysers of every size and craters of 
a myriad forms ; fountains of varying 
degrees of heat, tossing upward at 
unmeasurable intervals and varying 
in height from 20 to 250 feet. Some 
of these pools and craters from 
which the geysers rise have periods 
of strange and ominous quiescence, 
some are turbulent and vocal with 
the angry fires below, the craters of 
some are cup-shaped, some oval, 
some fantastically irregular; some 
are fringed, fretted, and beaded 
about with petrified incrustations of 
the most exquisite and fragile 

58 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

beauty; the bottoms of the pools and 
subsided geysers disclose in turn the 
most delicate tints of the rose and 
of the sky, varying the scale of the 
spectrum in red, blue, green, brown, 
gray, ocher, and gold. 

Silent now, all scepticism van- 
ished, yet scarcely grasping the 
scope and significance of the bewil- 
dering wonders which they had wit- 
nessed, they sat about their camp- 
fires pondering the seemingly om- 
nipotent versatility of nature in pro- 
ducing such inconceivable manifes- 
tations of awful power as the Giant 
Geyser, with its towering fountain 
hurtled 250 feet into the air, and 
yet placing but a few rods away the 
Morning Glory spring with its cone- 
like calix of opalescent crystal, its 
unrufipled surface, and its waters 
limpid and blue as the eye of a girl. 
They passed through the middle 

59 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

and lower geyser basins and saw 
the ever-varying wonders there un- 
folded: Turquoise Spring, Prismatic 
Lake, the Paint Pots, the contrasted 
beauties of the sylvan valley of the 
Firehole and the murmuring cata- 
racts of the Gibbon River. On Sep- 
tember 19, after leaving the geyser 
region, camped near the junction of 
the Gibbon and the Firehole rivers, 
the talk of the explorers turned upon 
the material opportunities offered by 
the incomparable and outlandish 
wonders of the country they had vis- 
ited. There were thoughts and sug- 
gestions of acquiring sections about 
the chiefest places so that they might 
be held in profitable control as show 
spots for travelers, and it was in the 
silence which followed these selfish 
suggestions that Cornelius Hedges 
gave utterance to the lofty thought 
that under no circumstances should 

60 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

private ownership of the region be 
countenanced, much less encouraged. 
It should, he said, be set apart by 
the National Government as a place 
of perpetual instruction and pleas- 
ure for all the people; it should be 
made at once a park and a wonder- 
land for the unrestricted delectation 
of the people and never a field for 
private speculation or mercenary 
greed. This lofty view of Mr. 
Hedges found instant response and 
approval with all the party ; and when 
the explorers broke their final camp 
in the park and headed for home it 
was wath the unanimous determina- 
tion to further and accomplish the 
plan for the erection of the Yellow- 
stone wonderland into a national 
park, preserving by one federal act 
the beauties, the marvels, the native 
wildness, the unharassed freedom of 
nature, living or inanimate, and all 

61 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

the pristine glories and portents lav- 
ished upon this region by the unac- 
countable hand of the Divinity. 
c^ « 
Dedication of Wonderland. 

Filled with this high idea, the men 
of the Washburn-Langford expedi- 
tion, many of whom were endowed 
with gifted minds, lofty ideals, and 
much learning, soon gave to their 
countrymen the first adequate and 
comprehensive idea of the priceless 
possession which lay so long hidden 
in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. 
Lieutenant Doane's splendid report 
made in December, 1870, was the 
first official statement made to the 
United States Government compris- 
ing accurate descriptions, maps, and 
data of the phenomena of the Yel- 
lowstone country, and, supplemented 
as it was by the writings, lectures, 

62 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

and incessant activity of General 
Washburn, Langford, H a u s e r , 
Hedges, and other enthusiastic and 
patriotic members of that 'expedition, 
the project took definite form, and 
in 1871 was scientifically advanced 
by the explorations and reports of 
Doctor Hayden, of the United States 
Geological Survey. 

In the autumn of 1871 William 
H. Claggett, who had just been 
elected Delegate from Alontana to 
Congress, undertook the task of in- 
troducing and advocating a meas- 
ure in accordance with the desires 
and plans of its originators. He 
was already independently interested 
in it and worked hard for its success 
at home and by correspondence. Air. 
Langford went to Washington with 
him, and together they drew the 
park bill, the description of bounda- 
ries being supplied by Doctor Hay- 

63 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

den. The bill was introduced in 
both Houses during that session, 
Senator Pomerov, of Kansas, brino^- 
ing it before the Senate and Dele- 
gate Claggett before the House. 

The camera had been brought to 
aid in the work, and perhaps no 
measure ever offered to the attention 
of Congress was better illustrated 
by photographs, maps, and argu- 
ment than the park bill which cre- 
ated the national park out of that 
prodigious w^onderland about the 
lak^ and headwaters of the Yellow- 
stone. 

THE ACT OF DEDICATION. 

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of 
Representatives of the United States of 
America in Congress assembled, That the 
tract of land in the Territories of Montana 
and Wyoming lying near the headwaters of 
the Yellowstone River and described as fol- 
lows, to-wit, commencing at the junction of 
Gardiner River, with the Yellowstone River, 
and running east to the meridian passing 10 

64 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

miles to the eastward of the most eastern 
point of Yellowstone Lake; thence south 
along said meridian to the parallel of latitude 
passing 10 miles south of the most southern 
point of Yellowstone Lake; thence west along 
said parallel to the meridian passmg 15 miles 
west of the most western pomt of Madison 
Lake- thence north along said meridian to 
the latitude of the junction of the Yellow- 
stone and Gardiner Rivers; thence east to 
the place of beginning, is hereby reserved 
and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, 
or sale under the laws of the United States, 
and dedicated and set apart as a pubhc park 
for pleasuring ground for the beneht and en- 
joyment of the people; and all persons who 
shall locate, or settle upon, or occupy any 
part of the land thus set apart as a public 
park, except as provided in the following 
section, shall be considered trespassers and 
removed therefrom. 

Sec. 2. The said public park shall be un- 
der the exclusive control of the Secretary of 
the Interior, whose duty it shall be, as soon 
as practicable, to make and publish such rules 
and regulations as he may deem necessary 
and proper for the care and management 
of the same. Such regulations shall provide 
for the preservation from injury or spoliation 
of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curios- 
ities, or wonders within said park and their 
retention in their natural condition. 

The Secretary may, in his discretion, grant 
leases for building purposes, for terms not 

65 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

exceeding ten years, or small parcels of 
ground, at such places in said park as shall 
require the erection of buildings for the ac- 
commodation of visitors; all the proceeds of 
said leases, and all other revenues that may 
be derived from any source connected with 
said park, to be expended under his direction, 
in the management of the same, and the con- 
struction of roads and bridle paths therein. 
He shall provide against the wanton destruc- 
tion of the fish and game found within said 
park, and against their capture or destruc- 
tion for the purpose of merchandise or profit. 
He shall also cause all persons trespassing 
upon the same after the passage of this act 
to be removed therefrom, and generally shall 
be authorized to take all such measures as 
shall be necessary or proper to fully carry 
out the objects and purposes of this act. 
Approved March 1, 1872. 

Military Expeditions. 
For more than twenty years after 
the act of dedication became a law, 
the Yellowstone National Park be- 
came a mecca for explorers, and not 
a year has passed without witness- 
ing- the presence of scientific parties, 
large and small, seeking newer and 

66 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

more minute data of the strange 
things to be found there. 

In 1872 Gen. John Gibbon, U. S. 
Army, with a considerable body of 
men made a tour of inspection. He 
tried to ascend the North Fork of 
the jMadison, but abandoned the ef- 
fort after a few days. His name 
was given to that stream. The fol- 
lowing year Capt. William A. Jones, 
of the Corps of Engineers, made a 
more extended and effective recon- 
noissance. He succeeded in cross- 
ing the thitherto impassable Absa- 
roka Range, verified the tradition 
of Two Ocean Lake, and discovered 
Two-Gwo-Tee Pass over the Con- 
tinental Divide. 

Prof. Theodore B. Comstock, the 
geologist who accompanied this ex- 
pedition, added much to the value 
of the report, which appeared in 
1875. In 1875 Capt. William Lud- 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

low, of the Corps of Engineers, ac- 
companied by Mr. George Bird 
Grinnell, a civilian who was then 
and afterwards one of the ablest 
champions of the park, made an in- 
vestigation and report of the coun- 
try which yielded one of the best 
brief descriptions of the park ex- 
tant. In that year Secretary of War 
Belknap, guided by Lieut. G. C. 
Doane and a large party, made an 
enlarged tour of the national pleas- 
ure grounds, and the story of the 
trip was ably written by Gen. W. E. 
Strong, who participated.. 

In 1877 Gen. W. T. Sherman and 
his staff visited the principal scenes, 
and the report of Gen. O. M. Poe 
added materially to the interest in 
and public appreciation of the place. 
That same year, at war with the 
Nez Perce, Gen. O. O. Howard tra- 
versed the reservation in pursuit of 

68 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

It 

the hostile Indians. Secretary of 
the Interior Carl Schurz, accompa- 
nied by General Crook, made an ex- 
tensive exploration, visiting many 
unknown portions. 

Capt. W. S. Stanton, of the Corps 
of Engineers, surveyed the park in 
1881, and Governor John W. Hoyt, 
of Wyoming, with a large military 
escort commanded by Maj. J. W. 
Mason, U. S. Army, established a 
practical wagon road entering from 
the southwest. General Sheridan, in 
1881 and 1882, made visits to the 
reservation and was the first to give 
to the public an idea of the then de- 
moralized state of its civil admin- 
istration. 

P. W. Norris and many less known 
explorers made frequent, desultory, 
and unimportant tours of the now 
famous park, each adding something 
to the literature and celebrity of the 

69 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

place, so that the region which is 
between the forty-fourth and forty- 
fifth parallels of latitude and the 
one hundred and tenth and one hun- 
dred and eleventh meridians of 
longitude became the most thorough- 
ly and scientifically explored section 
of the United States. 

The great travelers and famous 
men of many countries of Europe 
as well as of the United States be- 
gan to visit it, so that in 1883 a 
splendid expedition, including the 
President of the United States, the 
Secretary of War, .a lieutenant-gen- 
eral of the United States Army, a 
United States Senator, and an im- 
posing cavalcade of soldiers and 
civilians made an extensive tour; the 
same year there came a justice and 
associate justice of the Supreme 
Court, the general and many other 
distinguished officers of the army, 

70 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

six United States Senators, one ter- 
ritorial governor, the ministers from 
Great Britain and Germany, the 
president of admirahy division of 
the high court of justice of England, 
three members of Parliament, and 
scores of other men of eminence 
from Europe and America. 

A New National Precedent. 

These facts are recounted to show 
how suddenly and how effectively 
came the public attention which fol- 
lowed the dedication of the national 
park. The act itself contributed to 
the quick fame of the park, for it 
was at that time an unheard-of step 
among national governments, set- 
ting, as it did, a precedent which 
has since been, and will hereafter be, 
followed by other states and nations. 
Already this country has added the 

71 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Glacier, Yosemite, Sequoia, Chicka- 
maiiga, and many national battle- 
fields and cemeteries to the growing 
list of governmental reservations. 

New York and Canada have each 
preserved a park about Niagara 
Falls. Minnesota has segregated 
the headwaters of the Mississippi in 
Itasca Park. 

New Zealand has made a national 
park of its geyser and hot springs 
regions. There is a plan afoot to 
create a great game preserve in Af- 
rica, and in 1911 there was passed 
unopposed a bill in the Congress of 
the United States for the creation of 
a vast and beautiful scenic park in 
northern Montana, to be called Gla- 
cier Park. And yet it is a fact that 
no region of like size in the known 
world can compare with the Yel- 
lowstone National Park in point of 
natural beauty, or magnificence of 

72 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

scenery, or the marvels of its natural 
and yet outlandish phenomena. 

The act of dedication was so 
framed as to prevent the destruction 
of the curiosities, forests, and game 
of the park; it was calculated to pre- 
vent private occupancy and to grant 
only siich privileges as were neces- 
sary to comfort and pleasure of the 
public. But it provided no specific 
laws for the government of the re- 
gion, it neither specified offenses nor 
provided punishment or legal equip- 
ment for the enforcement of such 
rules and regulations as the Secre- 
tary of the Interior might see fit to 
establish. 

For more than twenty years after 
the enactment of the dedication the 
park was frequently the scenes of 
wanton vandalism, the wild crea- 
tures were hunted by hundreds of 
poachers and trapped indiscriminate - 

73 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

ly by fur-hunting bands from the 
adjacent territories. The confines of 
the park consisted then, as now, only 
of imaginary hues. Its waters 
teemed with fish; its caves and can- 
yons were the homes of myriads of 
bear. 

Buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope 
thronged its remote meadows and 
fattened upon the rich pastures of 
its forests and valleys. Moose, big- 
horn or mountain sheep, panthers, 
and other species of fur and meat- 
bearing animals, though not as nu- 
merous, were to be found in plenty. 
Mink, beaver, otter, ermine, marten, 
sable, fox (red, gray, and black) 
abounded and were made the easy 
and profitable prey of hunters and 
trappers. The awe and terror with 
which the Indians regarded the 
place, its natural remoteness from 
the haunts of the first white plains- 

74 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

men and argonauts, the impenetrable 
wildness of its hills and valleys, its 
forests and tablelands, its wealth of 
water, of foliage, of nutritious 
grasses and natural shelters, made 
of it from the beginning a natural 
sanctuary and home for the millions 
of wild animals which frequented it. 
When these facts became bruited 
among the market hunters and fur 
seekers, they swarmed into the park 
at all seasons. What havoc they 
have wrought will never be fully 
known. 

Guarding the People's Playground. 

Thus for twenty-two years the 
original hope and purpose of the 
promoters of the national park were 
defeated and the only everlasting 
and signal victory they had gained 
was the disbarment of private en- 
croachment by land speculators and 

75 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

selfish squatters. It should be un- 
derstood also that the first and most 
unselfish advocates of the park dedi- 
cation act had conceived extrava- 
gant ideas as to the income that it 
would derive from the leases and 
privileges that were to be let to ho- 
tels, coach lines, and other conven- 
iences and comforts for the travelers 
and tourists. 

They thought that this revenue 
would fully cover the expense of 
policing the park, opening the drive- 
ways, and guarding the natural 
treasures of the place. They over- 
looked the fact that the average 
tourist would not or could not tour 
the park as its discoverers and ex- 
])lorers had done; that there must be 
highways, good hotels,- safety, and 
even luxuries provided before the 
anticipated stream of travel would 
set toward the park. They forgot 

16 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

that the nearest railroad station was 
500 miles away and that to the out- 
side world of pleasure seekers ' and 
sight-seers the Yellowstone National 
Park yet remained a primeval and 
almost impenetrable wilderness. 

There can be no doubt that the 
long delay between its first discovery 
as a place of unthinkable beauty and 
wonder and the final exploitation 
and fame of the park was a fortui- 
tous circumstance. For if it had 
been disclosed to the world earlier 
than the civil war, or at any time 
during the progress of that conflict, 
the Federal Government would not 
have set it aside from settlement, 
and greedy speculators w^ould cer- 
tainly have entrenched themselves 
within its boundaries. 

So, too, the mistaken hopes of its 
enthusiastic promoters in anticipat- 
ing adequate resources from the 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

leases operated had a fortunate con- 
sequence; for it is probable that 
Congress would not have passed the 
act of dedication if it had not be- 
lieved that the park would be self- 
sustaining, or that it w^ould not be- 
come a financial burden to the public. ,. 
Even when the devastation and wan- || 
ton license of its desecrators became 
known, Congress for several years 
failed to make any appropriation 
either for the improvement or pro- 
tection of the national park. 

The first act of the Secretary of 
the Interior after the enactment of 
the dedication act was to appoint a 
park superintendent. Nathaniel P. 
Langford, from the day of his return 
from the famous Washburn-Lang- 
ford expedition the chiefest advocate 
of the measure, was appointed first 
superintendent of the park. The 
work was to be a labor of love with 

78 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

him. Eager, courageous, brilliant 
of mind, and prompt of action, pas- 
sionately proud and fond of the 
wonderland which he had been so 
largely instrumental in winning for 
his countrymen, Mr. Langford was 
the making of an ideal manager and 
guardian of the park. 

But from the beginning he was 
left without aid, encouragement, or 
financial support. He never asked 
nor expected a salary. The region 
over which he held single sway is 
larger than the States of Delaware 
and Rhode Island with a part of 
Massachusetts added. . Alone, with- 
out men or money, it is not strange 
that his task became not only im- 
possible of accomplishment, but that 
its unreasonable rec[uirements be- 
came a source of endless vexation 
and grief to Mr. Langford. Mean- 
while the press and the public abused 

79 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

him roundly for conditions of which 
he could know but little and which 
he was powerless to circumvent. 

First Efficient Management. 

Mr. Langford was succeeded by 
Philetus W. Norris, of Michigan, 
himself an enthusiast and an ex- 
plorer who had already accomplished 
much in the exploitation of the park. 
He was fortunate to have been in 
charge when Congress appropriated 
its first item in support of the na- 
tional park and with his administra- 
tion began the first efifective im- 
provement in its affairs. 

Norris was an indefatigable ex- 
plorer, an enthusiastic lover of the 
wondrous region in his charge, an 
untiring worker, and a man of abso- 
lute integrity and patriotism. His 
ceaseless wanderings into every nook 
and corner of the park disclosed a 

80 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

thousand marvels and beauties that 
had escaped precedmg" explorers, and 
his indomitable hardihood and ever- 
lasting vigilance put the first check 
upon the outlawry of the place. 

After five years of effective serv- 
ice, Norris was succeeded by Patrick 
A.' Conger, of Iowa, a man without 
interest in the work, with no con- 
ception of the great responsibility 
placed upon him. The weakness of 
his administration brought the park 
to the lowest depths of misfortune, 
but the very extent of its retrogres- 
sion excited public indignation and 
made for permanent reform in the 
management of the famous pleasure 

ground. 

It was also during the Conger re- 
gime of neglect and mismanagement 
that even a greater menace arose. 
Thus far no special leases had been 
granted. Permits of occupancy had 
81 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

been granted to a few, and small 
and scattered houses of public com- 
fort had been erected. The dedica- 
tion act specified that "only small 
parcels" of land be let to private 
parties. But now a company bear- 
ing the name ''Yellowstone Park 
Improvement Company" was formed 
for the ostensible purpose of improv- 
ing and safeguarding the park in 
a manner which had not been accom- 
plished by the Government. The 
Assistant Secretary of the Interior 
gave countenance to this scheme and 
a lease of 400 acres, including the 
principal points of 'interest in the 
park, was actually granted to the 
schemers. The uproar which fol- 
lowed this announcement came from 
every section of the United States. 
General Sheridan, who had vis- 
ited the park in 1881, 1882, and 
1883, made the country aware of the 

^2 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

deplorable conditions existing and 
called upon the sentiment of the 
people of every State to insist upon 
some definite action. The governor 
of Montana appealed to Congress 
and the powerful voice of the press 
was raised against the meditated 
stultification of the dedication act as 
a swindle and an outrage. The ef- 
fect was prompt and salutary. In 
1883 the sundry civil bill containing 
the annual appropriation for the 
park prohibited the leasing of more 
than 10 acres to any single party, 
authorized the use of troops in the 
reservation, and provided 10 assist- 
ant superintendents to police the 
park. That made an end to the "im- 
provement" company and gave to 
the Government and to the whole 
\vorld a new and lasting idea of 
liow highly the American people 
prized this unique and precious park. 

83 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Protecting the Wild Creatures. 

Up to this time hunting and fishing 
had been allowed without stint for 
the ''needs'' of camping parties. The 
privilege had been shamefully 
abused, and the wild creatures had 
been for years slaughtered and cap- 
tured without let or hindrance. Now 
the catching of fish except with 
hook and line, was absolutely prohib- 
ited and the killing of birds or ani- 
mals even for food was rigorously 
forbidden. But these stringent reg- 
ulations were either ignored or de- 
spised by the irrepressible poachers. 

The funds appropriated by Con- 
gress were still inadequate, and at 
last it was suggested that the Terri- 
tory of Wyoming, in which the larg- 
est part of the park is contained, 
should take over the responsibility 
and expense of protecting the tim- 
ber, game, fish, and natural curiosi- 

84 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

lies of the national reservation. The 
folly of this plan was quickly fol- 
lowed by its failure, but in 1884 the 
Wyoming legislature passed an act 
which ran its desultory course, in- 
creased the prevalent evils, created 
new difficulties and was repealed 
after two years of utter failure. 

The withdrawal of the Wyoming 
authorities proclaimed the unguard- 
ed state of the region. The as- 
sistant superintendents were worse 
than useless. They were all inexpe- 
rienced at the work required and 
considered their appontments as 
sinecures, the rewards of some po- 
litical activities. They peddled 
privileges, and as Chittenden wrote, 
''made merchandise of the treasures 
they were appointed to preserve.'' 
He says that ''Under their surveil- 
lance, vandalism was practically un- 
checked, and the slaughter of game 

85 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

was carried on for private profit 
almost in sight of the superintend- 
ent's office.'' 

Conger resigned and was succeed- 
ed by Robert E. Carpenter, of Iowa. 
This superintendent from the first 
looked upon his office as an oppor- 
tunity for profit to himself and 
friends. He gave no thought to 
the protection or improvement of the 
park, spent most of his time in 
Washington and there, in concert 
with a member of the notorious im- 
provement company, almost suc- 
ceeded in getting Congress to pass 
a measure granting vast tracts with- 
in the park to private parties for 
commercial purposes. Carpenter 
and his confederates were so certain 
of success that the}^ had themselves 
posted their names on claim no- 
tices and located for themselves 
the most desirable tracts. The scan- 

86 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

dal which followed the expose of 
this plot caused the dismissal of Su- 
perintendent Carpenter. 

Col. David W. Wear, of Missouri, 
then assumed control. He was a 
man of rare ability and immediately 
set out to remedy the wrong- 
wrought by some of his predecess- 
ors. Energy and intelligence marked 
his first acts of administration, but 
his sincerity- and zeal could not off- 
set the bad impressions left by the 
maladministration of others. Con- 
gress declined to appropriate further 
funds for the maintenance of the 
civil management of the park, and 
the Secretary of the Interior was 
compelled to call upon the War De- 
partment for military assistance. 

In August, 1886, Capt. Moses Har- 
ris, of the First United States Cav- 
alry, took charge of affairs in the 
national park. He had the ability 

87 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

and the disposition as well as the 
men and the means to estop many 
abuses at once. Trespassers soon 
learned that he meant what he said 
and that he was ready and able to 
enforce it. 

The dilapidated physical equip- 
ment of the park, the demoraliza- 
tion of its management, and the 
consequent contempt with which 
poachers, campers, and travelers 
alike regarded its lax restrictions 
combined at this time to force an 
immediate though tardy action from 
Congress. That body was at last 
aware of the deplorable state of af- 
fairs in the park, not realizing that 
its own failure to appropriate ade- 
quate funds was really as much the 
cause of the bad conditions as the 
incapacity, greed, indifference, or 
occasional obliquity of some of the 
early superintendents. 

88 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

There can be no doubt that Lang- 
ford would have made an ideal of- 
ficial if he had had the material and 
moral support of the Government. 
Norris did excellent work under sim- 
ilar difficulties, and Wear demon- 
strated his desire and ability to re- 
form abuses and administer his of- 
fice well. It was the refusal of 
Congress to appropriate sufficient 
money for the work that forced the 
induction of the military and the 
appointment of an officer of the 
army as ''acting superintendent.'' At 
the time and under the peculiar con- 
ditions it was the only alternative 
that could be thought of. 

Stringent Army Surveillance. 

Captain Harris took immediate 
steps to curtail or estop all encroach- 
ments. He posted the rules and 

89 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

regulations, dealt summarily with 
offenders, and gave the visitors to 
understand that he meant what he 
said. Meanwhile the question of 
road construction had begun to be 
solved. 

Capt. D. C. Kingman, of the 
Corps of Engineers, had already 
laid the foundation of the present 
system, and the excellent results ob- 
tained prompted Congress in 1900 
to place the work definitely in the 
hands of the Engineer Department. 
The code of laws for the regulation 
of the park enacted in 1894 put a 
check on abuses of leases and privi- 
leges. Tourist traffic increased 
with the erection and maintenance 
of better transportation facilities, 
more and larger accommodations, 
greater safety, and convenience in 
and about all the important places 
of interest. 



90 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The annual summer incursion of 
visitors grew from hundreds to 
thousands, and every witness of the 
marvels and the beauties of the 
place became thenceforth an enthu- 
siastic herald of its strange glories. 
The theory of the founders of the 
park commenced to be better under- 
stood and appreciated. ' The world 
came to realize the fact that the 
Government was in earnest in its 
desire to maintain, so far as pos- 
sible, the wild and natural character 
of the great reservation. The place 
and its possibilities came to be held 
sacred in the eyes of lawmakers 
and administrators of its laws and 
regulations. 

Such attempts as have been made 
to circumvent them, although con- 
tinued even to this day, became 
more secret and less bold — adroit 
schemes cunningly planned for the 

91 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

aggrandizement of private interests. 
At various times movements have 
been quietly but cuninngly begun 
for the inbuilding of trolley lines 
and even steam railroads, for the 
harnessing of water power and its 
conversion into the business of trans- 
portation, lighting, and even manu- 
facturing. 

In unfailing opposition to these 
selfish enterprises, the Government 
continues to adhere to its original 
policy of maintaining forever, so far 
as possible, the virgin splendor of 
the people's great playground. In 
tliis it must now and always will 
have the support and approval of 
enlightened and patriotic people of 
every nation. To this end it is not 
now and will never be necessary 
to gridiron the park w4th carriage 
roads and highways, but only to 
improve and sustain safe and smooth 

92 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

thoroughfares to the principal points 
of attraction. 

The vast wildernesses which sur- 
round these can never be improved 
beyond the handiwork which nature 
has already lavished upon them. 
Indeed they constitute and so should 
be held the natural sanctuary, home, 
and refuge of the myriads of wild 
creatures that contribute almost as 
much as the inanimate prodigies to 
the primeval and noble attributes 
of this matchless park. 

To-day the tourist in the Yellow- 
stone National Park, viewing the 
fringes of these almost impenetrable 
fastnesses, will not fail to see almost 
by the roadside of the traveled route 
bands of antelope and deer, an oc- 
casional elk or bear or Rockv Moun- 
tain sheep. They gaze with placid 
interest at the passing coach and 
go on feeding with the calm secur- 

93 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

ity of confidence. But they are 
only the outposts, the skirmishers of 
vast armies of their kind that swarm 
in the silent fastnesses of the for- 
ests that must be trailed in the re- 
mote places to be seen in all the 
glory of their safeguarded freedom. 

The Park in Winter. 

Early in January, in the heart 
of the Rocky Mountains, eight thou- 
sand feet above the sea and nearly 
forty miles from the nearest rail- 
road, I saw the first ''order" pre- 
pared on the range of one of the 
largest and most perfect hotel kitch- 
ens in the world. The "order" was 
for nails, hot nails, nails by the 
quart and by the gallon, piping hot, 
big and little, brads and spikes, ten- 
pennies and shingle nails, while from 
the walls inside and out, from the 

94 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

sub-cellar below and from the acres 
of gaping roof came the tattoo of 
the hammers of a hundred carpen- 
ters clamoring for nails, hot nails 
and plenty of 'em. 

Through a blinding blizzard with 
the wind blowing a horizontal gale 
of thirty miles an hour, over thirty- 
seven miles of almost trackless snow 
four feet on the level, through moun- 
tain gorges where the drift lay 
packed from ten to twenty feet, 
across frozen creeks and rivers, I 
had come in a horse-drawn sleigh to 
the brink of the Grand Canyon of 
the Yellowstone River in the Na- 
tional Park to witness the Titanic 
winter work of building a new half- 
million dollar hotel that was to be 
ready for the summer tourist by 
June. 

From Mammoth Hot Springs, 
thirty-seven miles away, where 

95 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

countless herds of elk, deer, moun- 
tain sheep and antelope, driven from 
the high places by the fury c^f the 
winter storms, gazed at us in meek 
and unterrified surprise, we set forth 
in a two-horse sleigh to face the 
pelting, driven steel-dust of a moun- 
tain blizzard. Passing beside the 
slopes of the steaming waters of the 
hot springs, and in the pass above 
the Golden Gate we met a slinking 
coyote, bold in starvation and gaunt 
as a skeleton, heading for the set- 
tlement to steal a meal or find a 
grave. 

In exposed reaches of the road 
the runners ground and squeaked 
over the bare sand and rocks; in the 
protected defiles the surface of the 
thoroughfare was obliterated, lost in 
piles of flour-dry snow heaped high 
against the side wall of the canyons 
and sloping away in perilous descent 

96 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

to the bottom of the gorges. Here 
the big scoop shovels came in play 
to open a passage for the team and 
sleigh, until at length the road de- 
scended into the desolate Swan 
River flat, where the gale swept in 
unbridled fury across an arctic 
waste of undulous snow from four 
to ten feet deep. 

For over three miles across the 
Swan River flats the road had long 
since been buried and now the 
course of it, winding and uncertain, 
is marked at either side by little 
pine trees stuck into the snow by 
the freighters to mark the edges of 
the obliterated road. A misstep to 
either side plunges the horses floun- 
dering into from four to a dozen 
feet of snow, for the only footing- 
is the six-inch snow-pack made by 
the runners of the freight-laden 
sleds creeping slowly over it in their 

97 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

long and perilous journey from the 
railroad station at Gardiner to the 
site of the new Canyon Hotel by 
the brink of the famous cataract of 
the Yellowstone. 

Low-pitched, six-horse, cumbrous 
sled w^agons manned by stalwart, 
brave and skillful freighters, grind 
and crawl over the almost incredible 
difficulties of this arctic trail. All 
that winter they had been hauling 
lumber, hardware, cement, tiling, 
doors, windows, bathtubs, tools, ma- 
chinery, supplies for men and horses. 
Ten million pounds in all they hauled 
through boreal storms, over snow- 
jammed passes, across ice-bound riv- 
ers, along the dizzy brinks of nar- 
row cliff trails and with the ther- 
mometer seldom above zero and 
ranging down to forty degrees be- 
low. 



98 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

A Task for Titans. 

Some task this, to build in a win- 
ter wilderness the grand chateau 
that now delights the summer holi- 
days of the tourist who visits the 
Yellowstone National Park during 
the brief season of its verdant glory. 
Two hundred and fifty men, hardy, 
alert, emulous and undaunted, had 
been fighting with the frost and 
blizzard, bucking the snow drifts and 
freezing their fingers and toes in 
this far place all winter long to the 
end that one of the most remark- 
able, extensive, beautiful and com- 
plete summer hotels in the world 
would be ready and running for the 
approaching season. 

There was something in this very 
task, as I witnessed it, that was in 
rugged harmony with the Titanic 
proportions, the heroic dimensions, 
the indescribable majesty of the 

99 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

scenes by which it is surrounded. 
Down from the divide between the 
valley of the Yellowstone and the 
Gardiner River, out of the endless 
aisles of snow-draped towering 
pines, we crept through the blinding- 
white snow on a Sunday afternoon. 
The storm had ceased, the last cloud 
had disappeared to the north be- 
hind the crenelate peaks of the Gal- 
latin range and the evening sun in 
cold but dazzling radiance was al- 
most touching the high horizon 
when our sleigh lurched into view 
of the new Canyon Hotel. 

A January evening, nearly eight 
thousand feet above sea level, the 
mercury at forty degrees below zero, 
civilization thirty-seven miles away 
across a wilderness of shining, snow- 
clad mountains, I saw my first 
glimpse of that new "summer ho- 
tel." Even before we had emerged 

100 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

into full view of it, we heard the 
volleys of clattering hammers, their 
cadences rising- and falling like the 
scattering reports of muffled mus- 
ketry. For they worked on Sunday 
all through the winter, and they 
reared the walls and roofed them 
over when their fingers were numb 
and their breaths froze in their 
beards ; they fumbled through banks 
of floury snow for the lumber and 
shingles and sacked cement; and 
they spent time in the hospital where 
the trained nurses thawed out and 
treated their frost-bitten faces and 
members. And that is the reason 
why the first dish served from the 
newly-installed kitchen range was 
hot nails. 

For the hauling of a carload of 
freight each day in the rapid building 
of the Canyon Hotel in the National 
Park, about fifty drivers and two 

101 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

hundred horses were required. 
When the snowstorms set in with 
their full winter fury, sleds with a 
capacity of three and four tons 
apiece could carry only 2,500 pounds 
or less. Horses downed in the 
drifts, loads overturned, sleds brok- 
en, harness torn apart, snow slides 
and sudden blizzards increased the 
hardships, the hindrances and the 
perils of the gigantic task. In our 
comparatively easy journey through 
this strange and rigorous scene, we 
passed snow-covered piles of freight 
that had been set beside the trail 
from overloaded sleighs, waiting to 
be hauled almost piecemeal over 
miles of nearly insurmountable diffi- 

cultv. 

o: ^ 

To Make a Summer Holiday. 
The two regiments of men who 
spent the winter of 1910-11 building 

102 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

this marvelous mountain hotel had 
been practically isolated from the 
world for months. They worked al- 
ways seven days of the week, they 
had no saloon or club or theater to 
beguile their time or bemuse their 
faculties and even for the younger, 
pleasure-loving workers there was 
no diversion except the fierce thrill 
of gliding and coasting on skis over 
the glacier-like slopes of the deso- 
late amphitheater which surrounded 
them. There is probably no other 
like example of hotel building in his- 
tory, and the structure which is the 
result, the scene which it civilizes 
without desecrating, the strange re- 
gion which it adorns without vulgar- 
izing, are all in keeping and in sin- 
gular symmetry. 

Unity without harshness, great 
size without ostentation, strike the 
beholder with his first view of the 

103 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Canyon Hotel. Without yielding 
anything of its own well-contained 
individuality, its surrender to the 
vast nobility of the scene in which 
it is placed, is complete, natural and 
captivating. Not of great height, of 
uniformly warm bright color, never 
in ornate competition with the land- 
scape about it, expressive of repose 
and strenoth, innocent of fantastic 
pretense or ornate frivolity, the new 
hotel by the Yellowstone in the Na- 
tional Park is an architectural tri- 
umph of singular and striking sym- 
metry with its natural environs. 

The even apex of its rambling 
roof-line is always uniformly hori- 
zontal, and yet the base lines of the 
foundation cling faithfully to the 
eventful contour of the mountain 
slope in lines of uneven and yet 
beautiful accord which suggest 
that the architect esteemed obedi- 

104 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

ence to and sympathy with the 
master landscape gardening of Na- 
ture herself.' 

AMien the summer days have come 
and you wish to survey this oddly 
splendid structure, take a walk 
around it close to the foundation 
walls. The distance is exactly a 
mile. And yet the highest lift of 
the building is not greater tha:n the 
roof-tree of the fourth floor. In 
every aspect of the great structure 
you will find a thoughtful, even re- 
spectful conformity with the voice- 
less demands of the scene about it. 
It is something to build within the 
nation's famous wonderland any 
kind of a house that detracts noth- 
ing from the noble majesty of the 
surroundings, but to have reared so 
vast and beautiful a hotel and in so 
doing to have enhanced instead of 
min.imizing the splendor of the view 

105 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

and the winsomeness of the place, 
is to have performed a work of gen- 
ius. 

Rustic it is not, in the same sense 
that Old Faithful Inn is rustic, and 
yet the Canyon Hotel of the Yel- 
lowstone contains in its structural 
lines, in the interior details, an in- 
sistent and yet unobtrusive sugges- 
tion of primeval arborial strength 
and beauty that is gently expressive 
of the forest fastnesses of pine trees 
that crowd the valleys and crown 
the summits of the neighboring re- 
gion. Architect Robert C. Reamer, 
who also contrived and constructed 
the historic Old Faithful Inn, smiled 
gravely when I commented upon 
this impressive feature of his latest 
and greatest work, saying: ''I built 
it in keeping with the place where 
it stands. Nobody could improve 
upon that. To be at discord with 

106 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

th-i landscape would be almost a 
crime. To try to improve upon it 
would be an impertinence.'' 

Bringing Europe to the Park. 

Months of travel in the pleasure 
places of Europe and the great tour- 
ist resorts of America, gave to 
Architect Reamer and to the pro- 
jectors of the Canyon Hotel many 
new and practical suggestions which 
have made surely for the composite 
simplicity and utilitarian scope of the 
edifice. In the course of these far- 
spread visits of inspection,- it was 
found, for instance, " that hotel 
guests, as a rule, are not apt for 
those small apartments which com- 
prise seclusion as well as elegant 
convenience. The writing rooms, 
the reading rooms, the Turkish 
smoking rooms, were found to be 

107 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

less attractive to the average tourist 
than the great lobbies where to see 
and be seen, to witness the proud 
pageantry of the guests in promen- 
ade, to study character and apparel, 
to gossip and to listen to the music 
seemed the sum and crown of the 
desires of the pleasure-loving guests. 
To eliminate the superfluous, be- 
cause unused, public apartments of 
the conventional tourist hotel 
prompted the builders of the New 
Canyon to combine the beauty, the 
convenience, the utility, the attrac- 
tiveness of them all into one great 
common-room. The combined al- 
lurement and practicality of the win- 
ter gardens of the famous spas of 
Europe were kept in mind; the ''pea- 
cock walks'' of New York's most 
fashionable hostelries, the need of 
a great dancing floor, a convention 
hall, a spacious concert room, re- 

108 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

cesses for writing, reading, smoking, 
reviewing the pageant — all of these 
usually scattered essentials of a mod- 
ern tourist hotel — were combined in 
The Lounge, the salient feature of 
the new Canyon Hotel and one of 
the most remarkable apartments in 
the world. 

This great room is two hundred 
feet long and one hundred feet wide, 
its great floor of polished oak and 
its walls and ceiling of finely finished 
red birch. Except for the massive 
alternating pillars that sustain the 
broad high roof, the walls of this 
huge room are almost wholly of 
French plate-glass. It extends 
length-wise from the south front of 
tlie hotel building, and from its mid- 
dle at either side, facing east and 
west, are two spacious, pillared 
porches, opening through wide doors 
and French windows onto the main 

109 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

level of the floor of The Lounge in- 
terior. The north end of this Lounge 
contains the stage or platform for 
the orchestra, flanked by wide, grand 
stair-cases which lead back of the 
stage through a broad, open space, 
into the spacious lobby of the hotel 
proper. 

The Lounge of the new Canyon 
Hotel in the Yellowstone National 
Park promises to become a famous 
favorite with the pleasure-seeking 
travelers of the world. I think there 
is nothing like it in Europe, certainly 
it has no counterpart in America for 
size, magnificence, spectacular im- 
pressiveness and practical comfort 
combined. You must understand 
that it projects two hundred feet 
from the southern front of the great 
hotel of which it is an essential part 
and feature. Its one high story, 
whose vast even floor is a few feet 

110 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

below the level of the hotel's 
main floor, comprises all of the 
utilities that are offered, all of 
the private elegances that are 
provided in the scattered, small, iso- 
lated and, usually, stuffy small apart- 
ments provided by other great ho- 
tels. From the open brink of the 
hotel lobby floor, the eye ranges 
above the stage upon which the or- 
chestra will sit, across the fine per- 
spective to the southern windows of 
The Lounge and thence across the 
descending landscape to where the 
Yellowstone Falls, itself masked by 
an intervening pine wood, roars and 
thunders in its final descent into 
the most astoundingly picturesque 
gorge in the world. 

The whole central floor space of 
The Lounge is at once a vast ball- 
room, promenade, auditorium or 
theatorium. In the pillar-spaced in 

111 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

tervals around the open margins of 
the enormous room, Hghted by the 
continuous walls of plate glass by 
day, and by two thousand electric 
lights by night, writing desks and 
tea tables, easy chairs, divans, foot- 
stools and rugs will offer to the 
guests the perfection of privacy with 
accessibilit}^ comfort and elegance, 
aloofness with sociability, in exactly 
that degree which each guest of the 
hotel may choose for himself. The 
music, the spectacle of the dancers 
and promenaders, the stir and in- 
terest of the summer-night throng, 
must become unobstrusive, imper- 
sonal, an impression rather than an 
interruption, in the bigness, the room- 
iness, the cosy out-of-doorness which 
are peculiarly characteristic in this 
most extraordinary apartment. 

The dining-room of the new Can- 
yon Hotel is designed and built upon 

112 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

a scale quite in keeping with the 
conception of The Lounge and the 
wonderful hotel lobby which con- 
nects them completing the trinity of 
common-rooms for guests. The 
splendid refectory is one hundred 
and seventy-five feet long, extending 
east and west, sixty feet in uniform 
width and with a great bay upon its 
southern front that is nearly fifty 
feet in diameter and twenty deep to 
the plate-glass bow-windows of its 
front elevation. The interior of this 
enormous dining-room has been 
treated in much the same manner as 
to walls and wood-work, with The 
Lounge and Lobby. Floors of oak 
and walls, pillars, doors and case- 
ments of red birch. The^i^illar, tran- 
som, chair and linen motive of deco- 
ration is the branch of the pine 
tree conventionalized. This motive, 
severe but characteristic, is carried 

113 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

out simply and with quiet consis- 
tency wherever the need of conserva- 
tive and yet decorative rehef is ap- 
j)arent. It is apparent in the chair- 
backs, in the shadowy transom-lat- 
tice, in the pillar capitals and even 
in the margins of the thousands of 
rugs which were made exclusively 
.for the new Canyon Hotel. 

More than one hundred thousand 
dollars was expended for the port- 
able furnishment of the hotel, and 
before the first season opened in mid- 
June, through snow-buried passes, 
over ice-bound rivers, across wastes 
of frozen drifts and by the tortuous 
trails of nearly forty miles of moun- 
tain and forest, every item for the 
use and en*joyment of the traveling 
public was in place and ready. Then 
the arctic desolation of the days of 
its swift construction gave way to 
the incomparable glory of the opu- 

114 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

lent summer in the Yellowstone 
Park, then the fur-wrapped sled- 
driving freighters yielded place to 
the happy, gallant reinsmen of the 
tourists' coach. , 

Of all the contrasted and mcred- 
ibly wonderful regions of the Yel- 
lowstone National Park, none clam- 
ors so insistently for long days of de- 
liberate inspection as does that in- 
comparable stretch of Titanic pano- 
rama which reaches from the Yel- 
lowstone Lake to the lower abysses 
of the Grand Canyon. The new 
Canyon Hotel, the construction ot 
wh^"ch amidst the rigors of an arctic 
winter I have attempted to describe, 
is situate in the heart of the most 
opulently varied landscape m the 
nation's greatest domain of colossal 
and portentous wonders. Other por- 
tions of the Park may be visited and 
appreciated in a few days. The 
115 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

scenes about the Grand Canyon of 
the Yellowstone, the wildest, oddest, 
most awesome and most grippingly 
beautiful combinations of majesty 
with tenderness, of savage splendor 
witli sylvan loveliness, are scattered 
here with the most whimsical lavish- 
nes? that Nature ever displayed. 

Refuge for Big Game. 

The creation of national forest re- 
serves in Montana, Wyoming, and 
Idaho, around the outside boundaries 
of the park, has operated favorably 
for the peace and protection of its 
fauna, and the game laws of those 
States, improved as they are though 
still open to betterment, have gone 
far to enhance the wise provisions 
for the permanent safety and multi- 
plication of the myriads of beasts, 
birds, and fishes which now make 

116 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

their home withm the mvisible boun- 
daries of this great domain. 

With that inexpHcable instinct with 
which nature has endowed them, the 
wild animals of the region seem to 
know exactly the imagined line wdiich 
bounds the four parallel margins of 
the reservation. Their hegira from 
the outsde sets toward it with the 
advent of the hunting season and 
they seem to know that it is their 
home. The profusion and richness 
of its pastures, the accessibility of 
its natural shelters and the isola- 
tion of its trackless hills and forests 
must have always appealed to them, 
but since the enforcement of laws 
for their protection, since the elimi- 
nation of the hunter and the trapper, 
these beautiful creatures appear to 
have realized a new assurance of 
contentment so that thousands of 

117 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

them never cross the boundaries of 
their paradise. 

The prodigahty of the natural re- 
sources of the park has been wisely 
reinforced by the planting and cur- 
ing of considerable quantities of tame 
forage plants for winter feeding. 
Deer, antelope and mountain sheep 
come down in herds to the feeding 
grounds during winter, there to 
feed and thrive upon the alfalfa hay 
which has been provided for them. 
Thus more than 1,000 antelope and 
half as many deer now winter an- 
nually in the valley of the Gardiner 
and about the slopes of Mount Ev- 
erts quite in vew of Fort Yellow- 
stone and the Mammoth Hot 
Springs Hotel. Occasionally some 
of them wander into the streets 
of Gardiner, which is adjacent 
to the -confines of the park, but 
they are so tame and inoffensive that 

118 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

the sportsman is ashamed to shoot 
and even the dogs respect them. 

The number of elk in the park has 
been variously estimated. These 
splendid animals have proved them- 
selves the most prolific and hardy 
of their contemporaries, and the 
most conservative estimates give 
their numbers as more than 25,000. 
Easy victims to the gun and guile 
of the hunter, for vears the native 
herds of buffalo were decimated and 
disturbed. Only since they have 
been segregated within inclos- 
ures and fed during rigorous sea- 
sons, have these noblest of typically 
American creatures gained in physi- 
cal and numerical conditions. 

A few of the original wild herd 
are yet at large in the Madison and 
Mirror plateaux and the Pelican 
and Hayden valleys, but the largest 
number is now confined to the 900 

119 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

acres of splendid pasture lands 
fenced for them in the Lamar Val- 
ley. The moose, too, are increasing 
in numbers, frequenting the marshes 
and thickets of the upper Yellow- 
stone, the Bechler, and the Gallatin 
Basin in the northwest corner of the 
park. 

The bear, if not the most numer- 
ous, is the most familiar habitant of 
this wonderland. Grizzly, silvertip, 
black, and brown, he may be seen 
at almost any time, sinHy or in 
g r o u p s , prowling contentedly 
through the brush or about the gar- 
bage refuse of the hotels. Tourists 
liave counted scores of them feeding 
at one time in familiar proximity at 
the park hostelries, and thousands 
of snapshots are circulating around 
the world an ocular proof of the 
tameness and amiability of bruin. 
At long intervals some old or invalid 

120 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

bear will betray signs of returnino- 
ferocity. Death is the penaUy of 
these seldom returns to savagery. 
Although the official killing of moun- 
tain lions has been discontinued, 
there are a few yet in the park, but 
their ravages are inconsequential 
and they are never a menace to man- 
kind. 

Geese, ducks, cranes, pelicans, 
and more than 70 varieties of small 
birds come yearly to rear their 
young about the lakes and rivers 
of the reservation. Most of the 
song birds choose their habitats near 
the places of human habitation, and 
they were from the first so molested 
and diminished by the forays of 
dogs and house cats that both of 
these domestic animals have been 
banished from the park. 

It has been by the preservation of 
the living- as w^ell as the inanimate 



121 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

wonders of the park that naturahsts 
as well as geologsts, scientists as 
well as sightseers, have come to 
know it as the world's largest, most 
varied, and most perfect w^onder- 
land. It is the onl}^ place in the 
world where civilization has seized 
upon only to safeguard the prodig- 
ious manifestations of nature's sec- 
rets. It is an illustration of the 
only incident in history in which 
the advent of man has not operated 
at variance with the native magnifi- 
cence of primeval beauty. Its phe- 
nomena antedate history. Its monu- 
ments were old wdien the traditions 
of the troglodyte were new in the 
caves of prehistoric man. 

New Volcanic Vagaries. 
Centuries count" as but moments 
in the variant conditions and activi- 
ties of nature in this region. 

122 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

The energy which made its marvels 
may have caprices, whims, vagaries, 
but it is yet dynamic and resistless as 
with an infinity of power. Great 
geysers have subsided for a time 
only to burst forth unexpectedly 
with new vigor and indescribable 
beauty; pellucid pools, for centuries 
unruffled in their adamantine beds 
have leaped without warning into 
boiling fountains. Yawning craters, 
vacant for years, have come to ut- 
ter groans as of the labor of some 
unseen and unclean monster, giving 
birth at last to hideous, living jets 
of mud that dance and wheeze as 
in some filthy frenzy. 

For every subsidence of fountain 
or geyser there is some new recruit 
to the bewildering display. Only 
lately a hitherto inactive hot pool 
broke into sudden activity. Above it 
had been reared a tent. Its surface 

123 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

was covered with a floor through a 
trapdoor in which its hot water was 
raised into washtubs. It was sur- 
mounted by the laundry of Old 
Faithful Inn. During the winter 
when none was there to witness the 
eruption except the winter keeper, 
the explosion came.- He was enter- 
ing his winter greenhouse nearby 
when, with a sudden roar, the hiss 
of steam, and the trembling of the 
earth the laundry and all its con- 
tents, floor, tubs, boxes, and benches, 
were tossed skyward at the sport of 
a mighty fountain which had spurted 
into life. The pool had become a 
geyser, and with a thought of popu- 
lar celebrity the single witness 
promptly named it the Merry 
Widow. 

During the season of 1908 a small 
but curious eruption became evident 
a few yards away from the Merry 

124 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Widow. It is neither a pool, a 
geyser, nor a spring. Yet from a 
small central orifice in the crust of 
the formation there exudes a con- 
stant upheaval of tiny hot crystals. 
Glittering like diamonds, insoluble in 
water, soon cooled and dried in a 
circular pile, they can be lifted in 
the hand, a beautiful evidence of one 
of the latest and least-known of 
the unclassed wonders of the 
park. Only the most inveterate 
and observant habitues of the 
reservation come in sight and 
touch with the changes and 
new developments constantly taking 
place. 

The names bestowed at random 
soon become part of the unwritten 
nomenclature of the place. Boiling- 
springs cool or become quiescent 
only to give place to new and turbu- 
lent springs. Small geysers break 

125 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

forth in remote places, there to spout 
or subside unknown to the thousands 
of visitors who cHng to the main 
Hues of travel and are more than 
gratified with the multitude of won- 
ders which they encounter in their 
brief sojourn. Nor are the hidden 
and undescribed attractions of this 
vast preserve confined to the weird 
and portentous wonders and the 
wild iDcasts there to be encountered. 
Hundreds of matchless sylvan 
scenes, valleys voiceless but for the 
murmur of their brooks, cascades 
that stripe with silver streaks the 
green-walled fortresses of the moun- 
tains, caverns that are lair to the 
fox, the bear, and the wolf, things 
tender and terrible, unseen by the 
eye and untouched by the hand of 
man, can be found on every side in 
the still wilderness of the Yellow- 
stone National Park. 

126 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Who, then, but must hope for the 
preservation of every foot of the 
3,500 square miles of this incom- 
parable possession, that its beauties 
may be unmarred, that its wonders 
may be undefiled, that its myriads 
of living", happy, wild creatures may 
be kept unmolested in its hospitable 
solitudes? The whole world has 
come to know and value the price- 
less worth of this pleasure ground 
and to look to the people of the 
United States for its fullest protec- 
tion, peace, and prosperity. Its wel- 
fare has become something more 
than the hope and dreams of its fore- 
sighted and unselfish explorers and 
projectors. It has become a matter 
of national pride and prudence, a 
subject of admiring interest to all 
the students and travelers of the 
world. 



127 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

Havoc of Winter Storms. 
The pleasure-seeking traveler and 
the official inspector who pass 
thrcugh or loiter in the Yellowstone 
National Park in the summer time 
cannot realize the transformation 
which occurs at the end of Septem- 
ber, intensifies as winter advances, 
and is maintained in almost arctic 
rigor for nearly nine months of the 
year. The physical inequalities and 
imperfections which are evident in 
varying degrees during the tourist 
season, both as to the acconmioda- 
tions and as to the transportation 
facilities, are directly traceable to 
the difficulties and disasters that 
occur during the stressful months of 
winter. Then the roads are piled 
high and wide with incessant snow- 
drifts. The grand tour becomes ut- 
terly impassable except by snow- 
shces. The lowlands are piled with 

128 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

undulous drifts, and the very trails 
are obliterated. The havoc wrought 
by these incredible masses of snow 
begins late in the spring, w4ien with 
a suddenness almost as unheralded 
as the descent of winter the sun 
blazes with summer energy, the 
warm w4nds blow, and the melting 
snow comes down in resistless 
cataracts, sweeping away roadways, 
undermining viaducts and bridges, 
and undoing much of the work of 
previous months. 

During subsequent weeks what 
with mud, pools, washouts, and de- 
bris from the melted snowslides 
miles of the main roads are impass- 
able for wagons and repair ma- 
chines. The work of reconstruction 
with the existing forces of men and 
teams, tools and wagons, is neces- 
sarily slow, imperfect, and tempo- 
rary in many cases. Hardly one hun- 

129 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

dred full days of work time are at 
the command of those in charge of 
meiiding the damaged thorough- 
fares, extending the road-building 
plans, and improving the general 
conditions of the park. The fidelity 
and zeal of those in charge of these 
great works cannot successfully off- 
set the lack of adequate means in 
money and men or cope with the 
destructive elements that have 
warred against them. The ultimate 
solution of this, one of the gravest 
and most apparent obstacles to the 
perfect conduct of the park's aft'airs, 
will come with speed and certainty 
when Congress shall supply appro- 
priations commensurate with the 
great and growing needs of the ad- 
mirable road system planned by the 
Engineer Department. 

Nor is the isolation of the scat- 
tered hotel plants or the annual dev- 

130 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

astation of roads the only problem 
raised by the long reign of ice and 
snow and frigid weather. With the 
cessation of travel and the advent 
of the hunting season the hardships 
of the wild animals necessarily com- 
mence, and the irrepressible poacher 
and hunter gets busy around the un- 
sentineled edges of the greatest 
game preserve in the world. 

The small existing force of civil- 
ian scouts is an admirable nucleus 
about which to upbuild an organized 
and trained body of men that could 
and would solve and administer the 
few remaining problems which hin- 
der the ultimate advancement of the 
best interests of the wonderland 
which they knovv^ like a book and 
love like a home. At many scattered 
points of vantage throughout the 
park log huts, called snowshoe cab- 
ins, have been erected for the shel- 

131 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

ter of the scouts. In these secret 
quarters fuel, food, and bedding are 
cached at the close of each summer. 
Quickly they become inaccessible 
except by snowshoes. All winter 
long the scouts in groups of two or 
three, guided by the most experi- 
enced of the number, track across 
the unmarked snow from cabin to 
cabin watching for skulking poach- 
ers, spying for the smoke of intrud- 
ing trappers, and investigating the 
characters and designs of the many 
furtive hunters who camp conven- 
iently outside the confines of the 
park ready to cross the lines and 
slaughter the unsuspecting game. 
These running scouts travel lightly 
and rapidly, skimming the snow on 
skis, carrying only enough food for 
a midday lunch, depending for 
warmth only upon the violent exer- 
tions which must be sustained be- 

132 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

tween shelters to prevent them from 
freezing. There is no camping for 
them until they have reached the 
faraway cabin which marks the end 
of their day's running. 

Indistinguishable from private 
horsemen, familiar with the country, 
devoted to the work, passionately 
fond of the great domain which 
is their home, properly paid and pro- 
vided with quarters and subsistence 
for themselves and their horses, it is 
apparent that the work of these men 
in the summer as well as in the 
winter w^ill be found unequaled in 
efficiency and constancy by any other 
method of policing the park. AMiat 
with patrolling the park, apprehend- 
ing thoughtless or criminal malefac- 
tors, fighting forest fires and regu- 
lating scattered camps, feeding the 
game in winter and preventing the 
ravages of carniverous beasts, their 

133 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

duties and dangers are constant and 
important. 

The police work of the park has 
been focused and made effective by 
the estabhshment of a trial court 
presided over by a United States 
Commissioner with headquarters at 
Mammoth Hot Springs. 

The enormous area of the national 
park, its unspeakable and awesome 
phenomena, its indescribable beauties, 
its perennial disclosures of new and 
astonishing things, the amazing va- 
riety of its countless attractions, the 
alternating contrasts of marvels win- 
some and prodigious, can be indi- 
cated but not appraised in these 
brief notes. 

For the great public of this and 
other countries repeated personal 
visits and sustained and intimate 
study of its lavish splendors and in- 
conceivable curiosities are necessary 

134 



STORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE 

to even an approximate appreciation, 
either of the Yellowstone Park 
itself or of the broad and pa- 
triotic spirit which has made it one 
of the proudest possessions of the 
whole people of the United States, 
as it is also the open and hospitable 
pleasuring ground of the travelers 
of every country on the globe. 




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